Posted
by
msmash
on Tuesday May 01, 2018 @12:07PM
from the tussle-continues dept.

Iran has banned all use of the popular Telegram messaging app. The ban had been introduced to protect "national security," said a statement aired on state television. From a report: Iran had been considering the ban since January when protests over economic grievances erupted in more than 80 cities and later turned into demonstrations against the clerical and security elite of the Islamic Republic. Some hardline officials said protesters used Telegram to organize the rallies, which were ultimately contained by the Revolutionary Guards and their affiliated volunteer Basij militia. The app was temporarily blocked in January. "Considering various complaints against the Telegram social networking app by Iranian citizens, and based on the demand of security organizations to confront the illegal activities of Telegram, the judiciary has banned its usage in Iran," state TV reported. "All Internet providers in Iran must take steps to block Telegram's website and app as of April 30," the judiciary website Mizan quoted a court order as saying.

If it sucked, it would pretty weird for both Russia and Iran to ban and block it.

Telegram operates in a simpler less secure mode by default, and when you want true end-to-end encryption you need to explicitly start a 'private chat'.

The default mechanism cloud stores the messages, which lets you have messages sync'd to multiple devices etc, lets you send messages when the other person is offline.

The 'secret chat' mechanism is end-to-end single device to single device, and it only works when the other party is online (so the messages aren't stored and forwarded by telegram, but directly sent between devices. And if you logout the key for the chat is deleted, so the messages are gone if you log back in. It also has gimmicks like expiring self destruct messages etc. (Naturally, the recipient can do the usual stuff to keep a self-destructing message... but it does mean if law enforcement or something gets your phone old messages will be gone.

So it sounds like the default isn't really much better than skype or whatever, but the private chat mechanism appears to be getting a ringing endorsement from both Russia and Iran now.

If that were the case, then directing the ISPs to block it's servers and prevent it from functioning in Russia and Iran would be pretty counter productive. If they were trying to trick you, they'd ban it, but make damned sure it remained really easy to get and that it still worked.

I mean, unless Telegram is hacked by the NSA and the CIA in cooperation with the FSB is getting Russia to block the app their trick American's into thinking it's secure... so that the FBI can spy on them.

And this is why you shouldn't be put in charge of security implementations.

A warrant could be issued or a law could be passed requiring telegram to store copies of all messages that pass onto its servers. Then if law enforcement were able to obtain at a future date one of the endpoints with the chat still running, they would be able to read all the messages between them, even if they'd been deleted on both endpoints.

Or a future development could come to pass revealing a flaw in the imp

Yes, ability to tap all forms of communication are essential to national security. Yes, they are kind of fucked in that respect. We all are, except the US... and maybe China if they go full autarky as far as tech is concerned, which they could.

Life is so much easier when you can walk in with a national security letter to backdoor any app you want, you have undercover moles putting exploits into everything and have labs all through the country to intercept shipments and backdoor hardware using the hardware design knowledge you gained from your moles. In the US unless you build your own communication device there is nothing the government can't tap, they do have that many fingers.

"Iran Bans Use of Telegram Messaging App To Protect the people in power from their citizens "

Or in other words.. "Totalitarian nation does thing that Totalitarian nations do to protect themselves whilst giving an obvious lie as the reason". This kind of thing barely gets a Meh out of me. Knowing a few Persians I feel for the Iranian people but getting hot under the collar over a phone app banned in a place I'll never visit is pointless.

If you need an easy free way around telegram being blocked, search on twitter for "telegram socks".A few people are running socks5 proxies that you can just enter in telegram settings. You might have to try a few to find a good one.

Telegram traffic is all encrypted so there should be no practical privacy problem.

Tor and I2p may also work, with the hassle of running extra software, and tends to be slower than the socks proxies.

I dislike the poster's strategic addition of quotes around "national security," which are not in TFA. It really is a matter of national security. Whether or not we like that nation or give a fig about its security is irrelevant.